


if i stumble (they're gonna eat me alive)

by theviolonist



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Halloween, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 13:13:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry was the first to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if i stumble (they're gonna eat me alive)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Verbyna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/gifts).



> Written for [this prompt](http://verbyna.livejournal.com/84734.html?thread=350462#t350462) on the [One Direction Halloween Fest](http://verbyna.livejournal.com/84734.html).

He doesn't sleep in the bed anymore. 

He always says he's coming, that he's staying in the kitchen to do the dishes, but she knows – she knows he stays up all night, drinking tea and watching into the darkness. He tells her he joins her when she's already asleep, and she used to believe him, but one night she waited for him until the sun rose. She snuck out of the bedroom, and there he was, sitting on the chair. He was crying. 

"I still love you," he was saying to the darkness. 

They don't talk about it. She doesn't ask. It's not her place. 

*

He loves her. She knows he does, and he knows she knows. It's not ideal, and she'll always be second best, but she can't really resent ghosts, can she? Sometimes she imagines them crowding around him when he's alone in there, barefoot on the freezing tile, and she hopes they're comforting him. _Take care of him_ , she says when she prays, not to God because God has been unfaithful too many times for her to still believe. 

But he loves her. It's like he even loves her more now that they're gone – he presses her close, his fingers creasing the silk of her tops on her hips, and he kisses her with gasping breath, whispers how much, how deeply, how unfailingly he loves her. How he'll never let her go. How he'd do anything, anything for her. 

She says she loves him too, but sometimes it doesn't even seem to matter, like his love is too big, too worrying to let him see anything else. He looks so pale, these days. So sad. So she tangles their fingers, she does the best she can, she kisses him back and slithers down his body and holds him fiercely, even when he starts sobbing into her hair. 

She doesn't really understand him. Did she ever? Probably not. Maybe once she had a chance, but now he's full of darkness and grief and if the ghosts could talk they'd probably tell the story of a different man. She does what she can. Grief is something you go through alone, and he goes through it at night, in a cold kitchen, looking like he's standing guard. 

"To what?" she asked him once. 

He didn't look at her. "The monsters," he said. 

*

They tried leaving a few times. They bought the cottage as a country house, to be able to host the whole gang on the holidays. They used to go there every summer: they'd pick up Danielle and Liam down the street, honk in front of Zayn's doorstep so that he and Perrie would follow in their car; then they were off to the West End to get Harry and Nick, and Niall joined them directly there because he spent the first half of the summer back in Ireland. 

And it was such a good time, too – Harry and Eleanor handpicked the dark berries that grew in the garden, where they let the wilderness take over the rest of the year (they did have a gardener, of course, but they asked him not to tidy the garden up too much. Now he's gone, too), and they made jam with it. Liam and Niall stood in front of the big orange-gold pot and watched the fruits and sugars simmer, talking quietly and stirring once in a while. Eleanor read in the lawn chairs, next to a dozing Perrie. Zayn smoked near the tulips. Louis set the ping-pong table in the middle of the garden and complained about Danielle beating him. Nick called them children, too affectionately for any of them to pay him any attention. At some point Harry came up behind him and kissed his neck, and they all made disgusted faces. Harry stuck out his tongue. 

It was good. Eleanor can't remember how many of those summers they had, before – before. Too few. The calm before the storm, it's how she thinks of it now, all those games of hide and seek and those nights making love, trying not to be too loud. It was too calm. Too happy. They should've known they had had more than their share of happiness. 

They tried leaving a few times. They packed for a whole day, folded every pair of trousers in silence, their teeth clenched. And then they laced hands, they headed for the door... 

They never left, in the end. There's something near the door, hovering in the darkness, and they can't get out. 

*

Harry was the first to go. 

It was in 2017. This summer was darker than the others, with big, puffy dark clouds cluttering the sky. But they didn't really care. They were still young, and the cottage was beautiful like that too, when the rain built its careful lace on the glass of the windows and they looked out, huddled together, breathing in the scent of the humid grass. They played board games when the electricity went out, ate bread with jam and goat cheese from the next village over. Liam would sweep them out of the oven and dispose them carefully on the plates, and the soft scent of cheese wafting in the kitchen. 

The berries were darker than usual, too. Eleanor doesn't know if that's what killed him. Could be anything, really. It's just – one night he went to bed with Nick, and they were laughing, holding hands and kissing messily, Nick pressing Harry against the doorjamb, raking his hands through his hair, and the next morning he was dead. As simple as that. Mouth open as though in a scream, pale skin, purple eyelids. Dead. 

Eleanor remembers it as though it were yesterday. They heard the scream, first, Nick's scream. It wouldn't stop, this scream, it just went on and on and on until Louis tugged on Nick's sleeve to get him to look away from the body and he just crumbled into Louis's arms, sobbing. He was a mess. They were all a mess. They couldn't believe it. How can you believe something like that? Harry was young, rich, in love. Happy. There was no reason for him to die. 

Eleanor remembers all of their eyes. Louis's were dark, blacker than Eleanor had ever seen. Niall's were wide, blue and frozen. Zayn's were unblinking. It made Eleanor remember that if you add up every colour, you always get black. She looked closer, at the collateral damage. Perrie's were golden, melted and burnt. Danielle's were fierce. Nick's were rimmed red. Eleanor wondered what her own eyes looked like. 

(Harry's eyes were shut, too. Probably weren't green anymore beneath his eyelids.)

The police came, the sirens blinking on the road as their cars rushed down the country roads. They watched them come from the second floor window, and when there was a knock at the door, they all looked at each other. No one wanted to explain. What would they have said? They didn't know anything. There wasn't anything to say other than "He's dead." They didn't want to say that either. 

Louis went, in the end. He didn't answer all of their questions, but he did enough, more than any of them probably could have. They took the body, and Nick went with them, blown away by the disaster. That's how Eleanor sees them all, now. Blown away. The storm took them one by one, and she's the only one left. 

*

It was never the same after that. They all knew that even outside of One Direction, the five of them only were what they were when they were together. There was no alternative, no way to build them back up. There would away be something missing. They were incomplete. 

They could've drifted away, shattered by the pain and unable to look each other in the eye after what had happened. They didn't. They kept coming. They didn't wait for the summer: they came back as soon as they could, taking refuge in each other. They never really left, actually. After Harry died. There was no place to go. 

Louis, though, Louis is the only one who literally never left. He cut ties with everyone, methodically. Modest. His friends. His family. Eleanor watched him do it. She couldn't stop him. Even if she could, she's not sure she would've. 

She helped him make more permanent rooms for everyone in the house, and they watched them trickle him, each time bringing more of their life with them. Perrie brought her vintage lamps. Zayn brought his comic books. Liam has his couch delivered. Niall cancelled his subscription to Aer Lingus. Nick came by once in a while. Didn't talk much.

It was probably the best solution, when you think of it. The paparazzi didn't go that far, even to talk about Harry Style's death. They didn't ask about the funeral, the crying fans, the quiet little cemetery in South London. Didn't ask about the pain. Rang, at first, but got the message when no one answered for two months. 

It was different. It wasn't the summer – the house was badly heated, there was no TV, not much else to do than remembering when the nights got endless and the sun only peeked out for a few hours each day, shining its glum rays down on them. They didn't play board games. They still made jam with the leftover berries, though. It's one of the things that kept them sane. They also listened to Nick's show on the little transistor every morning, right up until he was fired for sounding too sad. "Poor Nick," Eleanor said. He used to think he faked happiness well, she thought, but that she didn't say. 

He didn't come back to stay with them. They didn't resent him. Louis sold the bed and replaced it. The new one was at the other side of the room, but no one wanted to sleep in the room anyway. 

They got through the fall, and then the winter. There wasn't any snow, but the rain fell harder than it had any previous year in the decade. It rattled on the roof tiles, even broke some of them. Out of power for two days, reduced to watching the rain destroy everything, dig puddles in the ground and drown the plants. It wasn't the romantic rain, this time. This rain was destruction. It was a mother crying. 

When it stopped they got out only to discover the garden horribly damaged. The tool shed was bowled over, the flowers and the plants dead, deep trenches raked in the mud. One of them cried, Eleanor can't remember who. Maybe Liam. It was sad, it was so sad. Maybe it was her. Watching the garden whimper and agonize, and crying. 

The first day of the spring, Zayn and Perrie took the car and went into town to buy groceries. They never came back. The police phoned the house, talked about a car accident. Probably a default in the car, they said. When the results came back, it only confirmed what they'd all been thinking: the car had no default. 

_Evil is counting the corpses,_ Eleanor remembers thinking, _and we're mourning._

*

Nothing was ever easy after that. Talking wasn't easy – the words came out wrong, too sharp, damaged their lips and broke the enamel on their teeth. They always said the wrong things. In the end they decided to stick to yes and no. They could still make mistakes, but less. Sleeping wasn't easy. The nightmares plagued them all, Louis in particular. Eleanor got used to hearing the springs of the mattresses creak when he arched off the bed, screaming. Eating wasn't easy. Loving wasn't easy. 

Danielle lost her tan and became as pale as them, almost translucent in the morning light with her paper-thin bathrobe and fur slippers. She put on a bit of weight, forgot to smile. Liam trailed after her like a ghost, like he knew. Like he expected it. He probably did. They all expected something to happen, and it didn't disappoint. What "it" is, Eleanor still doesn't know. She's not sure she wants to ask. 

It wasn't Liam first, though. Niall was screwing a lightbulb back after the storm, one of these violent March storms with their whipping wind and vicious hail, when he fell. He didn't slip, the ladder was stable, but he fell. He didn't scream. They came running as soon as they heard the noise, but he'd broken his neck. There was nothing to do. 

They all stood there for a moment. They knew, for having done it before, how the rest went. Calling the police, welcoming them, watching the body get taken away. They didn't do any of that, though. It was a tacit decision: they sat in a circle around the body, their fingers touching on the cold tile, and they talked about him. They told stories about Niall, why he was the best of them, the sunniest, the most gentle and caring and funny. It was an homage. They knew that once death becomes official, nothing about it is quiet until the body is buried and the cemetery slowly empties out. 

Danielle took on the responsibility to call the police when they were finished. She hauled herself up with her pale, bony hands, declining Liam's help. She picked up the phone, dialled the number. "There's been an accident," she said. 

By then, they weren't famous enough to have it plastered on the front page of the papers anymore. They were grateful. You could have thought they would've liked the communal grief, but they thought it was better like that. There was no falseness in their desperation. Only quiet crumbling down. 

It was a beautiful day when they held the funeral. The sun was out, the birds were chirping. Liam was crying. The priest said a few things in Latin, a few others in English, thanked everyone for coming. Maura's sobs could be heard all around the graveyard. 

They came back to the house with heavy shoulders. They were feeling cursed, alone, cold. Only four left of them, and the rest young and dead. None of them was thirty when they died. Now it feels evident that something was chasing them, even them. They just didn't want to see it. Eleanor still doesn't want to see it. She doubts she ever will. 

After Niall died, there was nothing else to do but wait. They stopped playing (any games, board games, hide and seek, rolling around in fresh sheets), ate only the bare minimum, trying not to make too much noise. Didn't try to leave. Just waited, and let the grief overwhelm them, drown them. 

Saying they were ready when they came for Liam would be a lie. You can never be ready for death, and this time was no different. It was a few months after Niall's death, and it was summer again, the hot, sticky summer. For once, they'd risen from their apathy and dragged the ping-pong table outside. It was good fun once you got past the memories, the hot sting of their impact in the chest.

Liam's face was split in a smile, and opposite him Danielle looked eerily like Eleanor, pale and thin and almost inexistent in the light. Louis was shouting encouragement, lower than he would've before all this started. It wasn't the same as before, and there was no hope that it was ever going to be, but it was good.

Liam hit the ball, sent it flying back towards Danielle. He'd always been good at sports, and time hadn't quite taken that away, even though it had taken the strong build and the fearlessness. He laughed, hot and roaring. Danielle laughed with him, and bent down to retrieve the ball in the grass. Eleanor remembers looking as the dew dampened the hem of her dress and made it transparent, her white ankles showing through the blue gauze. It was a beautiful thing. 

They all looked up when Liam choked, but it was already too late. He was clutching at his chest, and there was nothing in his eyes but fear. Perfect, abject fear. He fell on the ground. 

Louis was the first at his side, and he tried everything he knew, CPR, mouth-to-mouth. He even tried shaking him, as though that would do any good. It didn't, of course. Liam remained there, on the ground. They didn't need to be told he was dead; by then they'd seen enough corpses to know exactly what death looks like. 

Eleanor called 911. She was the only one left who'd never done it before. 

* 

The paramedics collected the body from where they'd left it there in the grass, Liam's head dipped back into the mollified ground. He was still clutching his bat, his fingers clenched around it so tightly that the paramedics couldn't pry it out of his grip. 

The police tried to investigate, what with all the suspicious deaths, but they distanced themselves from it, claiming to know nothing. It was true. It still is. They know nothing. The police didn't find anything consistent, and they had other cases to deal with, so they dropped it. 

Eleanor still doesn't think anything is quite as tragic as Danielle after Liam died. She cried, first, but she was so dry and thin that she couldn't cry more than a few streaks of salt dampness. She grew so frustrated with it, not being able to cry like she had when she was a real girl, plump and full with her curves and her perfect life, that she took to banging her fists on the wall. She hurt herself. Broke the bones of her wrist once, twice. She had to stay in bed and her hands lay at her sides, looking like injured birds. Her nails weren't painted. It was white on pale pink on dull yellow on rancid chalk. 

Eleanor and Louis brought her tea and books. They took turns at staying with her, but she would always stubbornly refuse to either talk or eat anything they presented her with. They tried to force some food into eat, but she would stick her fingers in her throat and puke it all back out as soon as she'd gulped it down. 

They didn't give up, or maybe they did. Giving up becomes a very relative notion after so much death, but if she was asked now, Eleanor would say that she did all she could and feel like she was saying the truth. She did all she could, and the only thing she could do, in the end, was watch Danielle wither and die down, her light dimming until she simply couldn't have shone even if she'd tried. 

Her death didn't come as a surprise. This they can say, because they'd been at her bedside all afternoon, watching her shiver and shake and choke out Liam's name, over and over. She'd talked, at some point. For a day, she'd relinquished her silence, and what she'd told them was the entire history of her love for Liam, from the day they met backstage when preparing a X-factor performance up to the last time they fucked, including their honeymoon in Bali and this time in London when they went to see _Batman: the musical_. 

She was trying to say something when she died. Eleanor remembers that, her lips, the only thing still vibrant on her ghost face, berry-red. She licked them once, opened them. 

She started to say something. Couldn't finish. 

Her head rolled back, her hand went limp, and it was over. 

*

So here they are. Louis is waiting in the kitchen, talking with the ghosts he rallies every night around him, maybe to help him protect her or maybe to ask they drag him down with them. Whichever one it is, Eleanor doesn't care. She won't say she understands, but she doesn't mind not understanding. She suspects she doesn't want to. 

It works like that for a while, with them not trying to escape and Louis something kissing her dark and bruising, making her hair fan black against the pillows and swallowing her moans, with her getting him tea and him not getting back to bed. They explore the house until there's nothing to see. Eleanor would like to say they aren't scared, but they are – every time they open the door, when they push the trap to the attic. It doesn't deter them. They don't find any monsters. If they're here, they're hiding somewhere else, somewhere the eye can't see. Or maybe just somewhere they didn't think to look. 

One afternoon (at least Eleanor thinks it's an afternoon, but it's getting harder and harder to decipher what time of the day it is these days. Eleanor's grasp is loosening) they flick the transistor on and nothing comes. The silence. Louis fiddles with the buttons for a few minutes, until he realizes it's no use. Then he gives up, and he crumbles. He folds in on himself, because there's nothing Louis Tomlinson fears more than silence. 

But he gets used to it, because you get used to everything. He lets the ghosts talk to him and whisper endearments like they used to when they were still flesh and bone, lets them draw him in, and Eleanor watches from the outside, leaning against the doorjamb, cradling a warm mug of tea in her hands. She's always in her nightie, now. She doesn't change. There's no point. 

*

She feels it before it comes. It's probably all the time it's been lurking around her, simmering in the marrow of her bones. She's scared, but it's deep, something she can't shake off. She doesn't try to. 

She opens her eyes, temples beating with a dream she can't remember. The darkness is singing. Louis is in the kitchen with his ghosts, filling the silence with their murmurs. 

Eleanor puts on her silk bathrobe. Danielle's fur slippers. The ring Louis gave her, a plain silver band with no inscription. She pads to the kitchen. Her hair is stuck to her forehead with sweat. She's scared. Of course she's scared. 

Louis spins towards her as soon as she comes in; usually she doesn't make as much noise, just stands on the outside listening in. He senses the difference immediately. 

"What's going on?" he asks, rushed and low. His eyes are worried. He's beautiful, Eleanor makes a point to notice. 

"It's coming," she says. 

Louis opens his mouth to say no, but the dark slashes through him and he's left shivering, young and frail, barefoot on the kitchen tiles. 

"It's coming," she repeats. 

He takes a deep breath, nods. He opens his arms, and she sinks in his embrace gracefully, melting in his arms. She hooks her chin on his shoulder. They stay like that for a while, breathing each other in, sweat and fear and all, and then she stands up again, brushes her hot palms against her thighs. He pulls her in his lap.

The transistor is switched on and silent. The ghosts hold their breath behind their barrier of darkness. 

It's coming. They wait. 

It takes her first.


End file.
